The enhancement of inflaton loops in an alpha-vacuum

Abstract

While inflaton loops in the Euclidean vacuum generally have a negligible contribution to the power spectrum, loop effects can be substantially larger when the inflaton is in a non-thermal vacuum state. As an example, we show that in a truncated alpha-vacuum these loop effects are enhanced by the ratio of the Planck scale to the Hubble scale during inflation. The details of the inflationary models determine whether the coupling constants suppress the loop corrections relative to the tree level result.